On Sun, Oct 07, 2007 at 10:05:00AM +0300, Martin Vermeer wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 07, 2007 at 02:26:48AM +0200, Dov Feldstern wrote:
> > Hi!
...
> > AFAIU, charstyle insets "work" (i.e., determine the font attributes as
> > they
> > would appear in the latex output), in the following manner: when such an
> > inset is reached, and say it's a "noun" inset, then the command for
> > starting
> > the "noun" command is output, followed by the text of the inset, followed
> > by
> > the command for closing "noun".
>
> Yes, \noun{ and } respectively.
>
> > The problem with this is that it's a *new* method for determining the font
> > attributes, which comes alongside the already existing method
> > (character-attributes). And as complicated as character-attributes are,
> > mixing two different methods for control fonts appearance is only going to
> > make things more complicated. Firstly, just because every time someone now
> > wants to somehow interact with font attributes, now two different "places"
> > have to be checked in order to determine the current font attributes at a
> > given position (1. what are the character attributes at this position? 2.
> > is
> > this position inside an inset which could affect font attributes? And note
> > that the answer to (2) is not trivial, even if it's the *only* method
> > being
> > used). Secondly, this can lead to all kinds of situations of
> > over-definition: what if the inset determines one thing, but
> > font-attributes
> > determine another?
>
> What the inset does, is 'very' clear.
>
> > Or, what if you have two "emph" insets one inside the
> > other --- using the current implementation, I believe you'd get something
> > like "\emph{bla bla \emph{bla bla}}", which is probably *not* what we
> > want.
> > (To be sure, with the current character attributes implementation, I'm not
> > sure that we'd get what we want, either: we'd probably get "\emph{bla bla
> > bla bla}", which is at least better, IMO. What we'd really want might
> > depend
> > on the specific charstyles being used, but I don't see any good way to
> > even
> > recognize this situation using insets.
>
> Emph handles this situation on the keyboard input level by
> toggling. Which indeed is a good reason to keep it that way
> i.e., the range approach.
I should add to this two things:
1) In LaTeX, \emph actually works in the 'toggling' way, which
allows the emphasis style where you can emphasize a word
inside a larger emphasized area -- or text that is italicized
for some other reason -- by making it upright again. LyX just
supports that practice on-screen.
2) This would be very easy to do in an inset, as getDrawingFont
is your friend: just make it test for italics in the surrounding
font and respond appropriately ;-) The current Emph inset does
not do this, which is a bug.
As I said earlier, however, I propose _not_ to move emph to
inset mode, but hang on to the existing implementation, for
reasons explained: emphasization is a sui generis.
(But, what this implementation gets wrong is that is does not
distinguish the situations
\emph{aaa \emph{bbb} ccc}
and
\emph{aaa} bbb \emph{ccc}
which are visually identical but logically _vastly_ different)
- Martin
